Avoidance
Mark Liberman has pointed
us to the hilariously awkward musings of "Starcreator" on the
site forum.wordreference.com about stranded prepositions, which this
poster deprecates. But if you go back to the beginning of the
thread, something else interesting turns up, namely a discussion of
circumstances where no choice among alternatives seems
satisfactory. When people reflect on their choices, none of them
seems to work, so they claim to opt for some totally different
expression. It's not at all clear that this is the way people
actually behave; quite possibly, in their unmonitored moments they use
one or another or both or the alternatives. But the act of
reflection itself calls up attitudes that make both alternatives
problematic.
It started with "suzzzenn" (a self-described speaker of American
English, from New York), who appealed to the forum:
I could use some help with a paper I am
writing. I have looked at so many examples evrything is starting to
sound OK, even sentences that I know are wrong! Could native speakers
give me thier judgments as to which sentences sound natural and which
sound strange? I know that many of us were taught in school to never
end a sentence with a preposition, but please ignore that rule for
these examples! All the linguists that I have read say that there are
some situations where it is possible to end a sentence with a
preposition and the rule is an overgeneralization.
suzzzenn asked for judgments on a collection of sentences, which are
entertaining in themselves:
1. What a curvy road we are driving on!
2. On what a curvy road we are driving!
3. On the kitchen table, the man is sitting.
4. The kitchen table, the man is sitting on.
5. He's the one who I bought it from.
6. What a dirty room the children are playing in!
7. In what a dirty room the children are playing!
He waited for the crosstown bus.
8. For which bus did he wait?
9. Which bus did he wait for?
She left the conference after the second lecture.
10. Which lecture did she leave the conference after?
11. After which lecture did she leave the conference?
The ensuing discussion revealed respondents all over the map: people
who were generally happy with stranded prepositions, people who rigidly
insisted that they were always wrong, people who said you could always
go either way, people who said that sometimes there were alternatives,
sometimes not.
AND people who said that neither
of the alternatives -- 6 vs. 7, for instance -- were acceptable;
instead, they said, they insist on something like
The children are playing in a really dirty
room!. (Fronted prepositions are really hard to live with
in exclamations.)
It's a conflict: what the Wh Exclamation construction calls for
vs. what
Dryden's
Rule (a.k.a. No Stranded Prepositions) insists
on. If you're consciously attentive to Dryden's Rule you're in a
bind, and neither alternative will do. So you feel you have to go
for something else.
Probably there's no issue until you actually ask people which variant
they would choose. Probably, in real life they just do what they
do. (And, as linguists, we'd really like to know what that
is.) But when you ask, they're caught in a vise.
Another example/anecdote: one of my graduate students innocently
asked her mother whether she preferred
How big a dog did you see? or
How big of a dog did you see?
-- asking about the two variants of "exceptional degree modification"
(EDM, on which there's a considerable literature; the most recent
reference to the phenomenon in these precincts is
here).
Her mother said: neither was acceptable. One was too fancy, the
other too nonstandard. What you say is:
You saw a dog; how big was it? or
How big was the dog you saw? or
You saw a dog that was how big? or whatever.
I doubt that in real life she avoids all variants of EDM. But we
can't ask her; we have to listen.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 5, 2005 12:54 AM